You can cheat on the Olympiads. North Korea was caught cheating on the International Mathematical Olympiad twice.

Saying "coding" instead of "programming" is like saying "ciphering" instead of "mathematics". Please stop. Imaging the headline, "Arkansas is now the first state to require that high schools teach ciphering". I'm not a computer programmer, but I think you guys are disrespecting your discipline by encouraging the word "coding".

If most music sounds dull to you, then you better move beyond Western music. Listen to music which is not based on the diatonic scale. Example: Bulgarian state female choir. The dissonant chords will wake up your senses, and make you feel things you don't normally feel when listening to Western music. Even if you don't like it, I think it will help you understand what's missing from your musical palate, and lead you to discover something else interesting. Also, try to find not-too-Western-inspired African music. The chords sung by people from different cultures will push senses you never thought you had. Forreal.

You can't stop listening to music. Depression will slowly creep up on you, before you realize it.

Wagner did not invent those Norse legends, so I think it's more correct to say both Wagner and Tolkien "borrowed" from the same source. And of course, they're not the only ones...

But C has a small number of precisely-defined constructs like this, which are easily explained in a few pages of K&R. And they usually make sense and are consistent with all the other constructs. Understanding inheritance gotchas in C++ is way more difficult.

Double bonus if this result gets manufacturers of laptops to FINALLY include ECC memory.

Oh, c'mon, that is a joke, not flamebait. AND, given the long boot time for my Nexus 4, I wish Android had systemd.

Lenovo shipped 16 million PCs last quarter. If it received $500/PC for "boatware" for half of these, the revenue would be 4 billion dollars, which obviously didn't happen. If it reveived a more likely $5/PC, the revenue would be 40 million dollars, which is probably more than enough to support their tech support department.

At the very least move the kid to a class with a more capable teacher.At the very least move the kid to a class with a more capable teacher.

And if the principal does not allow you to move the student? School is not what it used to be.

Why not try to rehabilitate them? The Free Software Foundation agrees with your statement "we need computer hardware that is free and open all the way down to the hardware", but instead of sacking them they suggest telling them to "respect user freedom" etc. When I read the changelog from official Thinkpad BIOS updates which include the word "Linux", I'm more encouraged than discouraged about the company.

I think learning to write computer programs helps develop logical reasoning skills. Why? Because it helped my logical reasoning skills, and I like to generalize my own experience to the whole world :) Now, I don't think teaching "coding" to totally uninterested kids helps develop their skills, but exposing everyone to "coding" will get interested kids started as early as possible, which I think is good.

I agree. Writing "10 PRINT "Hello"; 20 GOTO 10" is not rocket science. Nor is doing something marginally more advanced. The "problem" most people have with programming is the same with math: "why would I even want to do that?"

I get requests to connect from people I do not know and when I check they usually are in some business that sells products in my field...
I can't prove this, but I strongly suspect all those linkedin requests I get from unknown people are generated by robots. I closed my account recently. Say no to spam.

Great point! Now tell me, which OS do you use? WIndows 8 Home, Windows 8 Pro, or Windows 8 Enterprise?

You might find Apophenia ( http://apophenia.info/ ) useful. A simple exam is here: http://apophenia.info/eg.html